After the Cambridge Analytica Debacle, Is It Time to Ban Psychographics?

What are psychographics you may ask? Well, you may not, but if so: the simple definition is that they are a companion to demographics, but they try to figure out what those demographics tell us about the person behind the demographic factors. This article looks at some of the features that could go into psychographics, like figuring out if a person is “concerned with health and appearance” or “wants a healthy lifestyle, but doesn’t have much time” or what ever the factor may be. This article was written in 2013, long before the Cambridge Analytica debacle with Facebook. That entire debacle event should have people asking harder questions of Ed-Tech, such as:

Audrey Watters will surely be writing about her question and more soon (its a huge topic to write about already), and Autumm Caines has already weighed in on her experiences investigating Cambridge Analytica long before most of us were aware of them. Like many people, I had to dig up some refreshers about what psychographics are after Audrey Watters’ tweet to make sure I was thinking of the right concept. And now I want to question the whole concept of psychographics altogether. Maybe “ban” is too strong of a word, maybe not. You can be the judge.

Even in the fairly “innocent” tone of the 2013 article I linked above, there are still concerning aspects of psychographics shining through: interview your customers with the agenda of profiling them, and maybe consider telling them what you are doing if they are cool enough; you can’t trust what they say all the time, but you can trust their actions; and “people’s true motivations are revealed by the actions they take”

But really, are they? Don’t we all do things that we know we shouldn’t sometimes, just like we sometimes say things we know we don’t believe sometimes? Isn’t the whole idea of self-regulation based on us being able to overcome our true motivations and do things we know we need, even if we aren’t truly motivated?

The whole basis of psychographics in this article is that you can trust the actions more than the words. I’m not so sure that is true, or really even a “problem” per se. We are all human. We are inconsistent. We change our mind. We don’t do what we say should, or do things that we say we shouldn’t at times. It is part of being alive – that makes life interesting and frustrating. It’s not a bug in the system to be fixed by trickery.

(Side note: anyone that really digs into psychographics will tell you that it is more complex than it was in 2013, but I don’t really have a stomach to go any more complex than that.)

So is it really fair and accurate to do this kind of profiling on people? At certain levels, I get that companies need to understand their customers. But they already have focus groups and test cases and even comment cards to gather this data from. If they don’t think they are getting accurate enough information from those sources, why would they think they could get even more accurate information from trickier methods? Either way, all words and actions come from the same human brain.

Look at the example of what to do with psychographics in marketing in the 2013 article. That whole section is all about tricking a person to buy a product, via some pretty emotionally manipulative methods. I mean, the article flat out tells readers to use a customer’s kids to sell things to them: “Did she love the one about the smiley-face veggie platters for an after-school snack? Give her more ways to help keep her kids eating well.”

Really?

What about just giving her the options of what you sell and what they are for, and let her decide what she needs?

And what if she starts showing some signs of self-destructive behavior? If the psychographics are run by AI… will it recognize that and back off? Or will it only see those behaviors as signs of what to sell, and start pushing items to that person that they don’t need? Do you think this hasn’t already happened?

Maybe I am way off base comparing psychographics to profiling and emotional manipulation. I don’t think I am. But if there is even a chance that I am not off base, what should our reaction be as a society? I don’t want to go overboard and even go so far as to get rid of customer surveys and feedback forms. If a company gives me a form designed in a way that lets me tell them what kind of ads I want to see, I wouldn’t mind that. Well, in the past I wouldn’t have minded. After Cambridge Analytica, I would want believable assurances that they would stick with what I put in the form and not try to extrapolate between the lines. I would want assurance they aren’t doing… well… anything that Cambridge Analytica did. [Insert long list of ethical violations here]

But would most companies self-regulate and stay within ethical limits with all that data dangling in front of them? Ummmmm…. not so sure. We may need to consider legislating ethical limits on these activities, as well as outright banning others that prove too tempting. And then figure out how to keep the government in-line on these issues as well. Just because Cambridge Analytica and Facebook are in the hot-seat this week, that doesn’t mean some government department or agency won’t be in that same seat tomorrow.

Engaging Your Local Community Online: The Overlooked Hard Work of #EngageMOOC

“What does polarization currently look like in YOUR workplace, or campus, or community…online and off? What resources are you turning to in order to try to deal with it? Is there anything you are currently engaged with that you can share with us?” These questions from the last week of #EngageMOOC are a bit difficult for me to answer. When most people read these, they probably think of things like block walking, or soup kitchens, or community groups, or things that are in our physical communities around us.

I certainly find those things important. My whole family climbed in a car to travel in the pouring rain to the meeting of local chapter of a political party in the new town we just moved to temporarily… only to find it canceled due to rain. What a bunch of snowflakes!

(it was actually pretty heavy and we should have known better ourselves)

Our attempts to get connected with people in our area have been a bit of a bust, as we just miss finding out about activities the day after or they get rained out. However, even once we find those activities, they will still be events for a specific political party. Polarization in our area currently looks like everyone doing political stuff with those that they agree with, and then not talking about political issues the rest of the time to avoid arguments.

Oh, sure – you ask any Republican if they know any Democrats and they will respond with “I have plenty of liberal friends!” or vice versa for Democrats. This will usually be followed by some statement that indicates they really don’t understand the other side.

A few weeks ago I saw our local HOA representative raving all over Facebook about “silly liberals.” I decided to message him about his activities, how public they were, and how they may make the few liberals in our community feel. Nothing accusatory, just asking him to consider their viewpoint. It was not a hostile conversation through DM, but he was pretty assured there was no harm in his words. Mostly just “liberals do it too” and “I have lots of liberal friends are okay with it” and so on. I don’t really think I got anywhere with him.

He is now leading a grassroots “community task force” to take a look at security at our community schools – and he has been clear he wants to push for armed teachers like neighboring school districts already have.

You see, the “arming teachers debate” is not theoretical to us in Texas. We already have schools that have armed teachers for years now (many of the “staff” that are armed there are teachers). This is the school district next to ours. People in my child’s school district are now asking “why can’t we have armed teachers like Argyle ISD?” People in Argyle ISD are also not content to just keep it there:

“I see a future where schools will be lumped into two categories. Gun free zones and ones that are not.”

“Argyle ISD and the Chief have done exactly what is needed to protect against the evils and evil people of this world!”

“Where Argyle is now, and where they started, and where they are headed is the future of safety in our world. They are not following, they and leading by example and showing everyone what must be done to protect our children at school.”

“Arming teachers is safety – they will not shoot without reason! Grow up people!!! Welcome to the millennial generation!!!”

To be honest, there really isn’t much I can do to change these people’s minds. But I have gotten through to some through debates on Facebook.

Yes, I said debates on Facebook.

Look, I know I am not going to change the world by debating on Facebook. I know that it is not for everyone. But so many people are so rarely exposed to ideas outside of their comfort zone – that silently reading a debate on Facebook might be the only time they are exposed to opposing viewpoints. You see, I bring up different points not to win the argument, but to expose the larger number of those reading the posts to different viewpoints.

Of course, I am not talking about arguing with “that uncle” on my private Facebook wall. I go to local newspaper and community groups and pages to bring up different views for consideration – from pro-vaccination to stricter gun regulation to transgender bathroom access to Black Lives Matters. Yeah, its not exactly what anyone would call “fun.” Usually it goes nowhere. But then there is that random DM from someone that tells me I have changed their mind on something. So I know it is getting through in some ways to some people, even though they might not let me know every time.

Look, if my strongly pro-Trump cousin can suddenly come out and post a rant on Facebook about how he is tired of Trump and will no longer vote Republican until they clean up their act… and he is quoting some ideas that I know I posted earlier… you know that I or someone else he is following on Facebook are getting through to him. We can’t just write these people off as extreme viewpoints that will never change. I get that it is hard work to get through to people, especially in online environments. It is not for everyone. But if that is something you feel you can do (and I wouldn’t recommend doing it constantly – I frequently will just get off social media for days at a time to recover from debates)… don’t feel bad for doing it. Don’t feel like your part is “less than” or “not as hard.” We need people to engage with different viewpoints, especially those where we are standing on issue of equality or safety that should be the baseline middle point (but has been labeled as “polarized” by others).

Getting Lost in the Four Moves of #EngageMOOC

This week we are looking at what to do about polarization and fake news in EngageMOOC. Our assignment this week was to look at Mike Caulfield’s Four Moves and use it to evaluate a web source. The Four Moves idea is a response to what Mike sees as the inadequacies of other information literacy checklists like CRAAP. Admittedly, these checklists do get long and cumbersome. For many people, this is not a problem. For others, it is. But in the end, my concern is that neither one will help with polarization.

So I am going through the Four Moves idea with common arguments that  I often see getting polarized online. To be honest, I really like the Four Moves idea… under certain conditions. I have not read through the longer book that is linked in the post above, so maybe all of this is addressed in there. For now, I will just focus on the blog post. The first step of the Four Moves process (which is not a check list… even though it technically is :) ) starts off with this:

Check for previous work. Most stories you see on the web have been either covered, verified, or debunked by more reputable sources. Find a reputable source that has done your work for you. If you can find that, maybe your work is done.

So this is great when dealing with a really simple new piece of news, like the example given of “Jennifer Lawrence died.” But the problem quickly becomes: what counts as a “reputable” source? Things like the CRAAP method are supposed to be about helping people determine what is reputable, so I am a bit confused as how the Four Moves would replace CRAAP when it technically starts after CRAAP is finished (yeah, I am giggling at that too). In today’s polarized climate, people look to very bad websites like Brietbart, The Blaze, and dozens of other extreme left and right organizations as “reputable.” Millions see these websites as “a reputable source that done your work for you”… even though they aren’t. Then there is the idea of being “debunked.” Of course someone that is anti-vaccination could look at Mercola as “reputable”… but that has been debunked, right? Yes, it has. But then the anti-vaxxers debunked that debunkation (is that a word?). Then the pro-vaccination side debunked that debunkination… and it has been going back and forth for a long time. Years. Decades. There are so many competing debunkinations that it is impossible to keep up with at times. The problem is, everything from the flat earth theory to the alt right to the anti-vaccination movement to the anti-gun control crowd have created an extensive network of websites that cite their own network of research, debunkinators, and reliable/credible sources. The problem is no longer “is this a reputable source” but “who do you say the reputable sites are out of all the competing ecosystems of so-called reputable sources”?

Go upstream to the source. If you can’t find a rock-solid source that has done your verification and context-building for you, follow the story or claim you are looking at to it’s origin. Most stories shared with you on the web are recoverage of some other reporting or research. Follow the links and get to the source. If you recognize the source as credible, your work may be done.

This flows from the same problem as the one above – going back to the source on most of the issues that polarize us will just end up at competing websites that all claim credibility and research. Even if you pull out Snopes or Politifact or Wikipedia, the response will often be “oh, those are leftist sites and I want something unbiased like Fox News.”

Read laterally. If you have traced the claim or story or research to the source and you don’t recognize it, you will need check the credibility of the source by looking at available information on its reliability, expertise, and agenda.

Looking at available information on reliability, expertise, and agenda is technically part of CRAAP… but again, some people see all of this through different lenses. When I look at Mercola’s website, I see an obvious agenda from people without expertise and lacking in reliability. But the anti-vaxxers sees a website that is full of reliability and expertise, with “no agenda but the truth.” The things is, if you see a new article questioning the safety of the flu vaccine, you can go through each of these steps and end up on Mercola and deem the flu vaccine as deadly.

Circle back. A reminder that even when we follow this process sometimes we find ourselves going down dead ends. If a certain route of inquiry is not panning out, try going back to the beginning with what you know now. Choose different search terms and try again.

Selecting different search terms on Google will pretty much give you similar results, because Google looks past those terms and gives you what it thinks you want based on past searches. Of course, using CRAAP you wouldn’t make that mistake… but that doesn’t automatically make CRAPP better.

(hopefully you are giggling as much as I am every time I use CRAAP. Oh wait…)

So the thing is, I really like Four Moves in place of CRAAP and other methods… when dealing with someone that would have the same version of “reliable” and “credible” that I do. And I am sure that someone with a very extreme conservative outlook on life would say the same thing… and would not trust me because of my views on what sites are “reliable” (that is actually not hypothetical – my name was released on the “list of worst pro-vaccination trolls” years ago because I have butted heads with so many anti-vaxxers online through the years). Polarization will continue as long as we can’t deal with the core issue that the different sides have a fundamentally different understanding of what counts as “credible, reliable sources.”

Losing a Friend in Times of Polarization: an #engageMOOC Side Thought

We have probably all experienced either ourselves being defriended on Facebook over something, or seeing others cut off contact with each other due to disagreements. Losing friends like that is definitely difficult due to the evolving constraints of social media, but I am referring to a different kind of loss here.

I met my friend Jeff in college, but we connected better later due to spending a lot of time hanging out during the after-college years. But I moved away and somewhat lost touch. However, we would reconnect and catch up as much as we could. When we all got on social media, Jeff and I would connect more often and discuss life as well as our favorite topics: music and/or religion. Our views evolved away from the evangelical bubble we had been stuck in during college. Or, to be more honest, none of us felt the need to try to pretend to fit in with a label that really didn’t fit in the first place.

Jeff was really more vocal about becoming a liberal. This cost him a lot of friends from our college days (but I also lost many of those friends as well). Jeff would get frustrated with the way he was treated and would shut down his social media accounts every so often. After a couple of months, he would pop back up with either a new account or new name and start asking me about music. Sometimes he found me, others I would go looking for him. This was his pattern for the last few years until it changed at the end of 2017. He shut everything down in early November and didn’t come back. So in January of 2018 I decided to do some digging to see where he had popped back up.

All I found was his obituary from mid-November.

What really enraged me about this was that I found out about it so much later. I was still connected with some of his friends from his hometown, but none of them bother to contact us and tell us. he had passed. Additionally, no one from our our college/post college circles seemed to even know he had passed away. We had all become so polarized that we had failed the basics of human decency: let people know when their friends have died.

Jeff had lived a hard life. He was a black child that was adopted by white parents in a small rural town in east Texas. Our mutual friends from that town would have known he passed away, because they all knew Jeff. Jeff often talked about not knowing anything about his birth culture growing up and only discovering it at Baylor University (and even then, he recognized it was a bit skewed there). After getting out on his own, he struggled with discovering he had mental disabilities. He changed his faith to agnostic and his political views to “true” liberal (what most people call neo-liberalism today). He explored different sexualities. All of this caused him to be ostracized by his friends, his old church family, and most people in his home town. I was one of the few that stuck with him, because I don’t have conservative views on any of those aspects of life.

But here was his obituary, ignoring all of that, and speaking of all of his activities at our old church. They used that time to describe him, but didn’t bother to tell any of us from that time of his life that he had passed away.

It was all about illusion. As a small town, they had to present the adopted son of a prominent bank manager as a “good Christian boy,” while making sure no one showed up to share any stories that might destroy that facade:

“I really haven’t talked to him since he went so radically liberal on Facebook.”

You see, his Facebook account was completely deleted after he passed away. He shut it down on November 6th. He died from a heart attack in his sleep on the 13th. His posts were deleted a few weeks later. I had thought it was him that deleted them right after Thanksgiving (I noticed his funny comments vanished one day in the “On This Day” section I am addicted to reading every day). Now I know it couldn’t have been him.

One of his Twitter accounts was also deleted. His other one? Still up. I don’t think they ever knew about it. If they did, it would probably be gone. If for anything, just to remove the profile picture he took of himself sticking his finger up his nose at conservatives. That was just Jeff’s sense of humor.

Of course, he was the one that was told he was polarizing others by speaking up for Black Lives Matters, progressive Christianity (and later agnosticism), and systemic injustices against those with mental disabilities. People cut him off for being “divisive.”

That is my biggest concern with the conversation of polarization today: what counts as the “norm” that people are “polarizing” away from? If people were being polarized over the size of the government, or socialism vs capitalism, or some other purely political issue… that is one thing. But when one person is fighting for equality for all, and the other is fighting against it because they think the status quo is just fine…. what can you do? Why is equality a pole to be polarized to, rather than the norm in the middle?

Sorry that I can’t fix that one Jeff. Also sorry that I never convinced you to like King’s X. You won me over on Rush, though – so you won that debate in the end. I guess I had hoped that some day we could actually record our parody of “Staying Alive” that mocks charismatic church culture. But maybe it is for the better that the world is forever spared from “Speaking in Tongues”: “Well, you can tell by the way I speak in tongues, I’m a Holy Ghost guy, no time for talk….”

Vygotsky vs Spivak: Sociocultural Theory and Subalterns in #EngageMOOC

To be honest, I am not sure if I am convinced if the world has become more polarized, or if we are just becoming more aware of how divided we already were. If you go back and look at ideas like sociocultural history, there certainly is ground work for the idea that we are all different. But one thing is sure: we need to improve where we are regardless of whether we just got here or have always been here all along and just didn’t know it.

My interest in sociocultural theory came about in an Advanced Instructional Design course, where we had to take some educational theory and argue 1) why it was an instructional design theory, and 2) why it counted as an advanced one. There are different flavors of Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory out there, but the way that I look at it that will suffice for this post is that we all belong to various sociocultural groupings that are constantly changing and affecting who we are and how we learn. These groupings can be anything from physical characteristics to employment status to educational study topic to even where we are currently eating a meal. The first set of videos in EngageMOOC touch on many different ways to look at some important sociocultural groupings, for example.

Because we are all slightly different socioculturally, and who we are socioculurally is in constant flux, making something like education into an unchanging constant becomes counter-intuitive to who we are as the human race. But those unchanging constants are what most theories look to codify.

Was I successful in defending sociocultural theory as an advanced instructional design theory? You can read the paper to judge for yourself (“Sociocultural Theory as an Advanced Instructional Design Method: Examining the Application, Possibilities, and Limitations”), but our instructor also admitted to us that there really is no such thing as “advanced” instructional design theories. The Master’s Degree program had an “instructional design” course, so the Ph.D. program was given an “advanced ID course… just because.

Not too long after that, I became aware of the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and especially her most well-known work Can the Subaltern Speak?  (good one paragraph summary here, or full text here). The basic problem she was addressing was how many post-colonialists were trying to help the untouachables in India, but were speaking for them instead of having them speak for themselves. Additionally, there was also the assumption that all of these groups had one collective opinion on any topic, thus erasing individual differences.

What does this have to do with our current polarization? We seem to throw around solutions like “just listening to the other side” or “just respond in kindness”…. but to those of us that have tried those methods, we find they rarely work. I have responded with kindness. I have responded with heated debate. I have responded with seeking to understand. Sometimes good dialogue is the result, but most times they keep arguing.

However, I have taken note of what starts many fights online. There is usually a provocative thought about the opposite side thrown out by a person, typically containing vast misunderstandings and outright hyperbole about the “other.” This enrages those “others,” who jump in and start swinging. For example, you will rarely see a fight start over someone saying “I am pro-life because I want to see all babies born.” You more typically see enragement ensue after some statement like “I am pro-life, which is so much better than you evil liberals that just delight in killing babies like your leader Killary does in her secret pizza basement ceremonies!”

Obviously, those of the liberal viewpoint take offense at this. But do we ask why they would get offended? I mean beyond the obvious reason that these statements are not true, and cast them in the most evil light. They know people think that way about them already – so why is it different when they see a FB comment from an acquaintance saying so?

I would submit that they feel their ability to speak for themselves has been violated by being cast into the wrong sociocultural grouping, based on assumptions from someone that didn’t even bother to ask what they think in their own voice.

They didn’t let the subaltern speak for themselves.

Spivak spoke about how subalterns can be anyone that is in a position of less power and control in a given situation, and not just the untouchables of India. In education, our students are typically subalterns to the instructors. In online conflicts, those that propose some wild misunderstanding of the “other” tend to quickly jump into the seat of power in those encounters, setting those they unfairly characterize into subaltern roles because of the language they utilize to tear them down.

So, of course, part of the task is getting everyone to realize that we all have unique sociocultural characteristics, and therefore we need to be allowed to speak for ourselves rather than have our beliefs dictated to us. But on the other side, when someone has attempted to erase our own voice in a situation, we should try to realize that it is okay to feel upset by that. It is okay to get “butthurt,” no matter what someone says. It is okay to push back. It is okay to ignore it. It is okay to respond in kindness, and it is okay to be angry. We are all unique people. We can all react uniquely. There is no roadmap.

But I would also suggest that we all need to learn from how we react, to make sure we don’t turn around and make others feel the same way.

Too many times, it seems like our solutions to “fake news” involves finding ways to get rid of anger. That will never happen. Other methods seem to point fingers at every time people get things wrong online. That will never end, because the first time people stamped letters into clay tablets was the first time people misunderstood something and wrote about it. People misunderstand – we always have, we always will.

None of this is easy. There will be no finish lines to cross to say “we fixed fake news!” or “we finally unpolarized everything!” It’s a process. You and I can only be our own unique part in it all.

The Dangerous Implications and Science of “The War Against Boys”

You might have noticed the PragerU videos going around claiming to have proof of a coordinated “War Against Boys” in our schools today. These videos are popping up everywhere, from ads in MineCraft game videos to viral sharing on Facebook. They represent the most recent work of Christina Hoff Sommers’ decades long crusade against what she sees as the problems with liberals and feminism. The two basic points of the video (and the book it comes from) are that 1) feminists invented a problem with girls’ education in order to ignore the problems with boys’ education, and 2) feminists have convinced society to improperly socialize boys, both inside and outside of schools.

The science behind these claims is incredibly problematic, but I want to look at that after looking at the real problem. Lee Skallerup Bessette sums up the implications of boys seeing these videos well:

I followed this up with a lamentation that I couldn’t find a good article that explores her points in addition to the scientific problems together, so I thought.. why not write that article here?

My brief time as an 8th grade teacher taught me that I tend to see in students what I want to see. I noticed that every time some flashy professional development speaker came along with some idea that sounded cool to me, I suddenly started “seeing” that problem in my classes. I finally realized that I need to see students for who they are, not who I wanted them to be. Pretty basic, I know… but I am a bit thick-skulled sometimes.

So when some teachers – especially here in the South – that are already skeptical of feminism see “The War Against Boys”…. how will that affect the way they see (and teach) their classes? Then, on the other side, you show these videos to young boys, convincing them there is a conspiracy – led by women – against them? Throw that in with the “purity culture” pervasive in so many parts of society (that teaches that girls are just there to tempt boys into all kinds of bad situations)…. you have a recipe for a disaster.

Much of this is not new… I remember hearing things about wars against manhood/boyhood/etc back in school in the 80s and 90s. But we need to start seeing the connection between all of this and our current political leader’s weirdness and hatred towards women. Go look into how many political leaders from more conservative area were raised on this idea of “feminist war against men” + “women are out to tempt you to sin.”

But what exactly is the problem with the science of “The War Against Boys”? For this, I will defer mostly to this review of the book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men by E. Anthony Rotundo (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/books/reviews/waragainstboys0703.htm). Its a short look at the problems, which can be summed up with this excerpt:

Examined carefully, Sommers’s case does not hold up well. She persistently misrepresents scholarly debate, ignores evidence that contradicts her assertions, and directs intense scrutiny at studies she opposes while giving a free critical ride to research she supports.

This would also apply to the current videos making the social media rounds, since they are based on the same logic. Rotundo’s conclusion is an important point to consider (he does examine specific points to back up his assertions in between these two quotes it you are interested):

But Sommers’s book is a work of neither dispassionate social science nor reflective scholarship; it is a conservative polemic. Sommers focuses less on boys than on the feminists and cultural liberals against whom she has a long-standing animus. As a society, we sorely need a discussion of boyhood that is thoughtful and searching. This intemperate book is a hindrance to such conversation.

So what is meant by “long-standing animus”? This review does not give too much explanation, but we can turn to another source to discuss that. This “take down” of Sommers is long, but it goes into many of the organizations and movements she has been a part of, as well as her support for the abuse of GamerGate. I link to this not as ad-hominem or guilt by association type of attck, but as context to know why Sommers has “long-standing animus” towards liberals and feminists. This take down shows how her books and videos come from a context that is extremely politicized in nature, specifically against the many straw-man caricatures she creates of those she disagrees with:

While she may bill herself as the “Factual Feminist”, her history suggests she’s a right-wing shill who uses her platform to spread misinformation about feminism, in the hope of opposing social change.

What you end up with is a factually skewed view of complex problems in schools that simplifies those problems to “girls are getting better treatment than boys” because “liberals and feminists hate boys” being fed to children as they watch videos about their favorite video games, and then shared by their parents and teachers on Facebook… none of which are aware of the hidden political agendas behind the videos. This is exacerbated by the teachers who watch the videos and swear they see this “war” happening in their schools.

Can I comment on that last part as a former school teacher? Really? You see evidence of a war against boys all the time – but you haven’t noticed it until some slick video on Facebook convinced you to see it? Who is the head of this war? Where is all of the organization coming from? The feminists and liberals? Even when you work in a school in Texas with mostly conservative-leaning teachers?

No, you don’t see a war against boys. You see a side to take, and instead of being a neutral observer, you join your pre-determined “side” and share the video to attack the other side. Passive-aggressively, of course, because the recent version of the videos has toned down the “evil liberals and feminists” to some subtle dog whistles. What does that mean when you are the one hearing those whistles?

Look, schools have problems. Every one of them has plans to address those issues, so they know. Sometimes those problems are focused among boys, or girls. But the problem is both, not either/or. Black and white dogma like the War Against Boys is the true problem – a carefully crafted war against society, designed to divide us all and destroy one side.

To Grade or Not to Grade: Does the Learner Get a Say?

Grading has been a contentious topic in some circles of education for decades now. Many outside of those circles seem to accept grading as either a good thing at best, or a necessary evil at worst, all the while never questioning if it is possible to not grade in the first place.

For me, I have found grades problematic for a long time. I used to be firmly against them, but years of teaching has changed my status from “against always” to “still not a fan, but it’s complicated.” What exactly has been complicating my views? Talking to students about grades.

I used to teach various undergrad instructional design courses at the University of Texas at Brownsville (before it merged to become UT Rio Grande Valley). We would have many online discussions about all kinds of education topics in these courses. I often found out how much I had framed my progressive / connectivist / critical lens of instructional design through things that looked good to me as a white person (as well as a male) without considering how those stances looked to people of color.

My anti-grading stance was one of these lens.

So I want to try and capture the overarching conversations and issues that were brought to my attention through these conversations with students and many others through the years.

When educators say “grades are bad,” we often offer a “conversational” approach to grading as an alternative. This typically means that instructors should have a dialogue with learners to give them feedback instead of grades, or at least let students come up with their own grade. Of course, this sounds great when you are white (or male) and you will be having this conversation with someone that probably looks a lot like you. But how does this “conversation” sound to an immigrant to this country? What about a first generation college student that is new to the whole system? What about a woman in a field that is typically dominated by men? What about a person of color at a predominately white university? Would they feel comfortable with having their success in the course rely on a conversation with someone that might not realize their own prejudices?

This is an area where we need to put our own anecdotes aside. Sure, students might be comfortable conversing with you… but what about all instructors in your department? All professors at your university? All teachers anywhere?

Sure, my white privilege makes having a conversation in place of a grade sound great… because my privilege will help me get the upper hand in that conversation more often than not.

And then, even in a situation where you have a white male student and a white male teacher, the teacher is still in the position of authority… and not everyone feels comfortable with trusting all positions of authority. Often for good reason.

We keep talking about how grading is bad because we need to learn to trust students, but how dangerous is it to replace grading with something else that requires all students to trust all teachers at all times? What does it mean to force them to trust all of us all the time?

So does any of this make grading “good” by comparison? No, it still doesn’t. As many of my students pointed out, they still recognize that tests, papers, assignments, etc have problems, bias, and inequalities. But with a multiple choice question, you know the right answer is there. With a complex rubric, you know exactly what you need to do to get a good grade. Those questions and rubrics are usually problematic, but at least the answer is there – and you just have to learn the game to get the grade.

With a “conversation” about a grade – you don’t know the rules going in. You don’t know which teachers are harboring unacknowledged racism or sexism that will skew the conversation and hold you down. At least with a graded test, if they give you a lower grade because of racism and sexism, you can point easily to that corruption and say “I chose the right answer and you still marked it wrong!” or “the rubric line says 1000 words and I had 1112 and still got points taken off!”

As many students explained to me in many different ways: even though the white dudes will have advantages and privileges with many tests and assessments, those assessments are so cut and dried that there is a clear path for everyone to achieve equality (even if it comes at a greater price for people of color than for the white students). For some, a clear – but more difficult – path to equality can be more attractive than an unclear, unknown path through potentially dangerous conversations. Of course, not all found it to be more attractive, but it is certainly attractive to some. Those students are important voices to listen to.

Then, of course, there are the students that say they are used to grades, so they prefer to have them. They will even go as far to say they don’t see the harm in grades. Not a “good” reason to me… but who am I to say that is the wrong? Research backs me up? Or does it?

Let’s face it – it is really hard to research the impact of grades themselves apart from student opinion. How do we know that we are researching the grades themselves and not the assignment that produces the grades? How do we know that we are looking at grades and not bad assessment design, or even poor teaching of the topic being assessed? Or motivation, or privilege, or tardiness, or…. any number of issues that a “grade” could reflect? The biggest problem with grades is that so many factors go into them that we have a hard time really telling if the grades are the problem or if one of many factors that produced the grade is the real problem.

So that leaves us with looking at things like “student satisfaction” and “self-reported motivation” to tell if grades are a problem or not – which is not a bad thing. But once you go down that path, you have to be careful not to look at the results the wrong way. Too many times, educators see a study and assume the results mean that we know the one solution for all learners at all times: “this study found that group work is good, so let’s make all learners do group work!” Well, the study probably found something like “test scores went up 31% when group work was utilized” or “45% of students indicated greater whatever on such and such survey when group work was utilized.” Studies show averages and statistics – not something that is true for all learners at all times. Research is helpful, but rarely answers one solution for all learners. Educators have to rely on their judgement when making decisions on grading.

Therefore, whether we as teachers choose to grade or not to grade, we are usually centering the decision to be graded on our bias for or against grading, regardless of whether individual learners want it or not.

(What I say is that we need systems that allow for learners to choose how they get graded and by whom…. something we are working on with self-mapped learning pathways (aka dual-layer, customizable modalities, and all the other terms I can’t decide on… :) ), but that is post for another day.)

To be clear, I still find grades incredibly problematic. When I read a post like “Why I Don’t Grade” by Jesse Stommel, I completely agree. I also recognize that there are complications and other sides to many of these points as well. Just as a quick example of what I mean, I want to run through the graphic from this post that has probably been shared the most – not to disagree, but to extend the conversation (probably while repeating some of what was said in this post and others out there – apologies for that):

For example, its true that grades are not good feedback. This is probably because I can’t find much evidence they were ever meant to be “feedback” per se, at least initially. It seems that grades and feedback were meant to be separate but complimentary ideas at one time. The further back in time you go, the more likely you are to see grade-books and graded papers with separate feedback columns. But as society as devalued and de-funded education, you see grades replacing feedback as a means to cope with what society is doing to education. So is that really a problem with grades, or society? I would have to honestly point more at society.

Also, I completely agree that grades make a horrible incentive. They never encouraged me to study harder or lesser. But talk about a can of worms there – try discussing what is an incentive? with a diverse group of students, and you might end up with a heated argument. Everyone seems to find incentive in different things. Its a pretty relative thing in some ways (not in others, of course). But do some students really, truly feel that grades are a positive incentive for them? You bet. Do I disagree? Yes. But if I make my stance on incentive the default one for the entire class, what does that mean about my class? Who is the center then?

For the next one, again I agree that grades are not good markers of learning. But that is because they never really were meant to be markers of learning. Again, you go back in time, there was a greater understanding that grades were a representation of a learner’s ability to apply what they learned to an assessment or paper or what have you. But not as an actual marker of actual learning. There was a greater understanding (at least in older books) that learning was difficult to measure, and a grade was only evaluating the application of learning to an assignment or test. Through the years, many have lost sight of this. Many who champion grades have lost sight of this. Many administrators and policymakers and news-makers and so on have lost sight of this. Again, not the fault of grades but society.

This reasoning also applies to how grades are not reflective of the idiosyncratic, subjective, and emotional character of learning. I completely agree, but again, that is because grades are not supposed to reflect that. They just reflect how learners can apply the idiosyncratic, subjective, and emotional aspects of learning to specific tasks, assignments, assessment, and so on. Again, much of society has just lost sight of that, there by devaluing those aspects of learning to the point of barely acknowledging them in so many corners.

And then, I agree that we see a lot of competitiveness over grades – just look at the news. This is not a good thing. But where does this competitiveness come from? Most grades are based on a scale of 0-100% for a reason: they are supposed to reflect how close an individual learner got to perfecting the graded task (a problematic statement of it’s own, of course). Grades only become competitive when we put one learner’s grades next to another and compare them. That is another societal thing, and it is one of many major issues threatening education on all fronts. I know some people actually like that kind of competition, and I try to be understanding of that mindset. But I think that we can see so many quantitative and qualitative effects of that competition currently consuming education, that we can at least say that we should at least massively dial it back. But again, that is really a societal thing more than a grade thing.

On to the last one. This point is one that gets at the common argument in support of grades: objectivity. This is another one that is a huge can of worms once you get discussing it with students, as there are so many versions of “what counts as fair.” Some see grades as a way to make assessment fair, others see the problems with grading as making that fairness impossible. Really, when it comes down to it, our bias and other factors influence most arguments for or against various definitions of fair. So, unfortunately, the best we can usually come up with is “I think this is fair because I think it is so, and I think that is unfair because I think it is so as well.” We can lean on societal definitions and social contract, but history has proven that is not always the morally best option. Few or our positions are very defensible either way if we were to argue our case before an impartial observer.

However, I think within the “fairness” argument is a way to frame grades that objectively encapsulates one argument against grades that can’t be influenced by bias or context or the whims of society. One of the reasons grades are not fair is that a grade, by itself, does not tell you anything about how the learner earned that grade. You see an 80 – does that mean it was a perfect score that had 20 points taken off for being late, or a slightly above effort turned in on time by the learner? There is no way of knowing either way just by looking at a grade by itself. Educators mix so many things into grades – punctuality, following directions, context, format, etc – that by the end, any single grade is a reflection of all kinds of things in addition to how well the learner could apply their learning to an assignment. Then, if one adds up all the assignments in one class into an “A, B, C, D, E, F” grade… and then, add up all the class grades into a GPA… you end up with a number that really tells you nothing about the exact way that grade was determined. Whether you label that as fair or not, it is still a huge issue.

Of course, one could say that this issue is easily solved if we just add the ability for every instructor to input qualitative feedback to each grade. Have the instructor tell why that grade happened, and problem solved, right? Very true, but you would then have just eliminated the need for grades for anything other than competition – and no one cares about that competition after you have graduated. They only care about GPAs as a proxy for that qualitative feedback. But if they have it….

In other words, giving the explanation for why someone got a specific grade ultimately negates the need to have the grade listed in the first place.

When one looks at all of my reasons and others’ reasons for not liking grades, so many of them can be written off by the “pro-grade side” (if that really is such a thing) as bias, taking grades out of context, historical misunderstanding, applying relativistic standards, or blaming grades for societal problems. And I still stick with my views on grades even though all of this is true, because you can’t easily separate all of that out even if attempting to “reform” or “fix” or “reclaim” grading. But at the end of all that, I still come down to the fact that a grade by itself doesn’t explain what it really means… and adding that meaning removes the need for the grade in the first place in the bigger picture of what really matters in education (because even if you like competition, you have to recognize it is not what really matters in the grand scheme of education). The main thing that we can do to best fix grades would make them obsolete, and that should say a lot.

Can the Student Innovate? An #OLCInnovate Reflection

The 2nd OLC Innovate conference is now over. I am sure there will be many reflections out there on various aspects of the conference. I hope to get to reflect on my presentation on learning pathways and some of the ideas that attendees shared. But I wanted to first dig into one of the more problematic aspects of the conferee: the place and role of students.

The biggest problem related to students at the conference was how they were framed as cheaters at every turn. Chris Gilliard wrote a blog post that explores this aspect in depth. I was able to finally meet and hang out with Chris and many others at Innovate. Those of us that got to hang out with Chris got to hear him pondering these issues, and his blog post makes a great summary of those ponderings.

The other student issue I wanted to reflect was also part of what Chris pondered at the conference as well:

Of course, as soon as I tweeted that, we found there were a few sessions that had students there. But for the most part, the student voice was missing at OLC Innovate (like most conferences).

At some levels, I know how difficult it is to get students at conferences. Even giving them a discounted or free registration doesn’t help them with expensive hotel or travel costs. Sponsoring those costs doesn’t help them get a week off from class or work or both to attend. Its a daunting thing to coordinate. But considering the thousands of attendees at OLC Innovate representing tens or hundreds of thousands of learners out there, surely some effort to find the money would have brought in a good number if the effort had been there.

But beyond that, it seemed that in many places the whole idea of students even being able to “innovate” was left out of some definitions of innovation. Not all, of course. Rolin Moe brought his Innovation Installation back to OLC Innovate, which served as a welcome space to explore and ponder the difficulties in defining “innovation” (those pesky-post modernists always wanting us to “deconstruct” everything….) Rolin did an excellent job of looking at situating the definition of innovation as an open dialogue – a model I wish more would follow:

The definitions of innovation became problematic in the sessions and keynotes. The one that really became the most problematic was this quote from one keynote:

https://twitter.com/mrkampmann/statuses/850107391387611136

(I am also not a fan of the term “wicked problems”)

The context for this definition was the idea that innovation is a capability that is developed, and really only happens after a certain level of ability is obtained (illustrated by a pianist that has to develop complex technical skill before they can make meaningful innovative music). The idea that some creativity/innovation isn’t “good” was highlighted throughout the same keynote:

For context, here is the list of “Innovation Capabilities” that were shared:

There was also various other forms of context, all of which I thought were good angles to look at, but still very top-down:

This was capped off by the idea that there are “good kinds” of innovation and “bad kinds” of innovation, and we should avoid the bad innovations:

Of course, the master of all meme media Tom Evans made a tool to help us make these decisions:

What one person sees as a “bad” innovation might be a “good” innovation to another. Not sure how to make the determination in such an absolute sense.

There was also an interesting terms of “innovation activist” that was thrown in there that many questioned:

I get that many want a concrete definition of innovation. But I think there are nuances that get left out when we push too strongly in any one direction for our definitions. For example, I agree that innovation is a capability that can be trained and expanded in individuals. But it is also something that just happens when a new voice looks at a problem and comes up with a random “out of the blue” idea. My 6 year old can look at some situation for the first time and blurt out innovative ideas that I had never heard of. Of course, he will also blurt out many ideas that are innovative to him, but that I am already aware of. And there lies the difficulty of defining “innovation”….

Whatever innovation is, there is a relative element to it where certain ideas are innovative to some but not to others. Then there is the relative element that recognizes that innovation is a capability that can be cultivated, but cultivation of that capability is not necessarily a prerequisite to doing something “innovative.”

In other words, any definition of innovation needs to include the space for students to participate, even if they are new to the field that is “being innovated.” The list of Educational Capabilities pictured above is very instructor/administrator/leader centric. Some of those items could be student-centered, but the vocabulary on the slide seems to indicate otherwise. But ultimately I guess it goes back to whether one sees innovation as absolute or relative to begin with. If Innovation (with a capital “I”) is absolute, then there are definitely some things that are innovative at all times in all contexts and some things that aren’t, and therefore Innovation is a capability that has to be developed and studied in order to be understood before participating. But if innovation (with a lower case “i”) is relative, then anyone that is willing to can participate. Including students. But you rarely (at any conference) see the student voice represented in the vendor hall. And as with any conference, how goes the vendor hall, so goes the conference….

Big (Scary) Education (Retention) Data (Surveillance)

Big data in education might be the savior of our failing learning system or the cement shoes that drags the system to the bottom of the ocean depending on who you talk to. No matter what your view of big data is, it is here and we need to pay attention to it regardless of our views.

My view? It is a mixture of extreme concern for the glaring problems mixed with hope that we can correct course on those problems and do something useful for the learners with the data.

Yesterday at LINK Lab we had a peak behind the scenes at a data collection tool that UTA is implementing. The people that run the software at UTA are good people with good intentions. I also hope they are aware of the problems already hard coded in the tool (and I suspect they are).

Big Data can definitely look scary for a lot of reasons. What we observed was mostly focused on retention (or “persistence” was the more friendly term the software uses I believe). All of the data collected basically turns students into a collection of numbers on hundreds of continuums, and then averages those numbers out to rank them on how likely they are to drop out. To some, this is scary prospect.

Another scary prospect is that there is the real danger of using that data to see which students to ignore (because they are going to stick around anyways) and which students to focus time and energy on (in order to make the university more money). This would be data as surveillance more than educational tool.

While looking at the factors in this data tool that learners are ranked by led to no surprises – we have known from research for a long time what students that “persist” do and what those that don’t “persist” do (or don’t do). The lists of “at risk” students that these factors produce will probably not be much different from the older “at risk” lists that have been around for decades. The main change will be that we will offload the process of producing those lists to the machines, and wash our hands of any bias that has always existed in producing those lists in the first place.

And I don’t want to skip over the irony of spending millions or dollars on big data to find out that “financial difficulties” are the reason that a large number of learners don’t “persist.”

The biggest concern that I see is the amount of bias being programmed into the algorithms. Even the word “persistence” implies certain sociocultural values that are not the same for all learners. Even in our short time looking around in the data collection program, I saw dozens of examples of positivist white male bias hard coded in the design.

For example, when ranking learners based on grades, one measure ranked learners in relation to the class average. Those that fell too far below the class average were seen as having one risk factor for not “persisting.” This is different than looking at just grades as a whole. If the class average is a low B but a learner has a high B, they would be above the class average and in the “okay” zone for “persistence.”

But that is not how all cultures view grades. I have been to India and talked to many people that were under intense stress to get the highest grades possible. It is a huge pressure for many in certain parts of that culture. But even a low A might not register as a troubling signal if the class average is much lower. But to someone that is facing intense pressure to get the best grades or else come home and work in Dad’s business… they need help.

(I am not a fan of grades myself, but this is one area that stuck out to me while poking around in the back end of the data program)

This is an important issue since UTA is designated as a Hispanic Serving Institute. We have to be careful not get into the same traps that education has fallen into for centuries related to inequalities. But as our LINK director Lisa Berry pointed out, this is also why UTA needs to dive into Big Data. If we don’t get in there with our diverse population and start breaking the algorithms to expose where they are biased, who else will?  Hopefully there are others, but the point is that we need to get in there and critically ask the hard questions, or else we run the risk of perpetuating educational inequalities (by offloading them to the machines).

For now, a good place to start is by asking the hard questions about privacy and ownership in our big data plan:

Are the students made aware that this kind of data is being collected?

If not, they need to be made aware. Everywhere that data is collected, there should be a notification.

Beyond that, are they given details on what specific data points are being collected?

If not, they need to know that as well. I would suggest a centralized ADA-compliant web page that explains every data point collected in easy to understand detail (with as many translations to other languages as possible).

Can students opt-out of data collection? What about granular control over the data that they do allow to be collected?

Students should be able to opt out of data collection. Each class or point of collection should have permissions. Beyond that, I would say they should be able to say yes or no to specific data points if they want to. Or even beyond that, what about making data collection opt-in?

Who owns the students’ data (since it is technically their actions that create the data)?

This may seem radical to some, but shouldn’t the student own their own data? If you say “no,” then they should at least have the right to access it and see what is being collected on them specifically.

Think of it this way: How will the very substantial Muslim population at UTA feel about a public school, tied to the government, collecting all of this data on them? How will our students of color feel about UTA collecting data on them while they are voicing support for Black Lives Matter? How would the child of illegal immigrants feel about each class at UTA collecting data about them that could incriminate their parents?

edugeek-journal-avatarThese issues are some of the hard things we have to wrestle with in the world of Big Data in Education. If we point it towards openness, transparency, student ownership, and helping all learners with their unique sociocultural situations, then it has potential. If not, then we run the risk of turning Big Education Data into Scary Retention Surveillance.

Pokemon Go and the Gimmickification of Education

I almost dread looking at my social media feed today. Pokemon Go (GO? G.O.? (wake me up before you) Go-Go?) received a large bit of media attention this weekend, apparently even already spawning posts about how it will revolutionize education and tweets about how we need what it produces in education:

All I could think about is: how did we get to this point? Every single tech trend turns into a gimmick to sell education mumbo jumbo kitsch tied to every cool, hip trend that pops up on the social media radar. I guess I shouldn’t been that surprised once Block-chain became educational, or Second Life was used to deliver classes, or Twitter replaced LMSs, or MySpace became the University of the future, or DVDs saved public schools, and so on and so forth. I bet at some point thousands of years ago there was a dude in white toga standing up in an agora somewhere telling Plato how chariots would revolutionize how he taught his students.

I’m all for examining new trends through an educational lens, but every time I just want to say “too far, Ed-Tech®, too far!”

We all know education needs to change. It always has been changing, it always will, and will always need to have a critical lens applied to how and why it is changing. But with every new technology trend that gets re-purposed into the next savior of education, I can’t stop this gnawing feeling that our field is becoming a big gimmick to those outside of it.

A gimmick is basically just a trick intended to attract attention. One or two seem harmless enough. Well, not that harmful? But once everything that comes down the pipe starts become this trick to get people to look at education, the gimmick gets old. People are still asking what happened to Second Life, to Google Wave, to you name the trend. After a while, they stop buying into the notion that any of us know what we are talking about. Just think of the long-term effect on the larger discourse of so many people declaring so many things to be the savior of education, only to abandon each one after a year or two.

edugeek-journal-avatarThe problem with the hype cycle of Ed-Tech is that is buries the real conversations that have been happening for a long time on whatever the hype-de-jour is. Do you want the Pokemon Go for education, where students are engaged, active, social, etc? We already have a thousand projects that have done that to some degree. Those projects just can’t get attention because everyone is saying “Pokemon Go will revolutionize education!” (well, at least those that say that un-ironically – sarcastic commentary that apparently went over many people’s head not included).

(see also “Pokemon GO is the xMOOC of Augmented Reality“)